There is a legal and regulatory need to impartially determine, certify, or verify that a cannabis plant, or cannabis product, was produced under certain cultivation conditions. For example, currently, almost all states within the United States where cannabis is legal (typically as “medicinal marijuana”), 20 of 23 states (as of January 2016) require that the cannabis be cultivated indoors. These regulations occur at both the state and municipal levels. Yet at present there are no quantifiable tests or processes in the marketplace that can confidently identify a cannabis plant that has been cultivated indoors versus a cannabis plant that was cultivated outdoors.
The existing need is for an independent, analytical, and reliable test that is based on a combination of quantitative measurements and statistical analyses, and that is not a test based on either personal, experiential observations, or an approach that relies on the use of printed labels attached to the plant. One advantage of an analytical and quantitative measurement approach is that it can be conducted by many analytical facilities to reach the same conclusion and to ensure reliable quantitative results, independent of the analyst or laboratory. This is the kind of testing approach called for by the National Research Council. In contrast, experiential observations can be subject to personal judgment biases and influenced by the depth of the analyst's experience, leading to different and often conclusions. Labels (e.g., tags, bar codes, RFID chips) attached to plants offer no guarantee that the material has been indeed cultivated indoors. Indeed such labels can be added afterward to a cannabis plant cultivated under either indoor or outdoor conditions, especially when a chain-of-custody process is not in place.
At present there are no reliable analytical tests available to determine, certify, or verify that a plant or plant product had been produced as a result of determinable cultivation conditions. For example, there are currently no available tests or processes to reliably and quantitatively indicate that a plant was cultivated indoors. The present disclosure provides new, quantitative, and reliable tests or processes to verify, certify, and proclaim that cannabis was cultivated under determinable conditions, such as indoors, as required by state laws and regulations.
Stable isotopes at natural abundance levels are nature's recorders, storing aspects of the environmental conditions in the organic compounds within the plant, plant organs, and plant compounds. Historically, stable isotopes at natural abundance levels have been used to source the origins of controlled substances, such as cocaine and heroin. Recent studies of stable isotope abundances—measured as ratios—in cannabis have been used to source the cultivation conditions and origins of the cannabis. While three publications have noted that cannabis plants cultivated indoors could be distinguished from cannabis plants cultivated outdoors, none of these studies developed the analytical tools or unbiased processes to reliably categorize plant cultivation conditions. The three publications are: Tricia N. Denton, et al., Natural Abundance of Stable Carbon and Nitrogen Isotopes in Cannabis Sativa Reflects Growth Conditions, 28 Aust. J. Plant Physiol., 1005-1012 (2001); Jason B. West, et al., Stable Isotope Ratios of Marijuana. I. Carbon and Nitrogen Stable Isotopes Describe Growth Conditions, 54, no. 1, J. Forensic Sci., 84-89 (January 2009); and Amanda L. Booth, et al., Tracing Geographic and Temporal Trafficking Patterns for Marijuana in Alaska Using Stable Isotopes (C, N, O and H), 202 Forensic Sci. Int'l., 45-53 (2010), each of which is incorporated herein by reference. Instead, each of these studies simply placed cannabis plants into an indoor versus outdoor classification based on an arbitrary threshold isotope value. Other drawbacks of existing identification processes also exist.
Disclosed herein are systems and processes that rely on different theoretical framework for interpreting stable isotopes ratios, network analyses, and Bayesian interpretations to certify the likelihood that the cannabis had been cultivated under determinable conditions, such as indoors, and provide a quantitative measure of the average indoor CO2 concentration during plant growth. Other advantages also exist.